Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Stir
Or cut the tomatoes into quarters, place them in a porcelain saucepan and boil to a pulp. Run through a coarse, and afterwards a fine sieve, and boil down for three or four hours, or until as thick as jelly, stirring constantly especially toward the last to prevent burning. Stir in for each peck of fruit, 3 ounces of salt, 3 drams of allspice, ounce of yellow mustard, 1½ ounces of black pepper, 4 drams of cloves, 1/4 ounce of Cayenne pepper, 2 quarts of pure white-wine or cider vinegar. Stir in the ground spices and the vinegar. Bring the whole to a boil for not more than five minutes and bottle when cold. - Canning Tomatoes. - Select firm, ripe tomatoes, place them in a colander and dip them into boiling water just long enough to loosen the skin.
Remove from the water, place them where they will drain, and carefully pull off the skin without injuring the fruit. Once more place in colander to drain and pack carefully in large glass jars or cans as full as they will hold. Place these in hot water, bring to a boil and seal.
Or if tin cans are used, first apply with a soft brush fresh butter or unsalted lard to the inside of the can and its cover. This will prevent the fruit acid from attacking the tin and forming a poisonous compound. Seal with a bit of solder or putty, or lay over the top a cloth dampened with alcohol, run paraffin over this and draw over the top a piece of cotton batting.
Two related entries sit here: a spiced tomato catsup boiled down to jelly thickness, and a method for putting up whole peeled tomatoes. Neither can be followed today, but the measurements and terms are worth decoding.
- A peck of fruitA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12 to 14 lb of tomatoes. Reduced three or four hours to the thickness of jelly, the pulp cooks down to a small fraction of its bulk before the 2 quarts of vinegar are stirred in, which is why the spicing reads so heavily.
- Drams and ouncesIf read as avoirdupois weights, a dram is 1/16 oz, about 1.8 g, so 3 drams of allspice is roughly 5 g and 4 drams of cloves about 7 g. The apothecaries' dram of 1/8 oz was also current for spices, so the figures are not certain. The recipe specifies the spices are ground.
- A dropped quantityThe mustard is given simply as "ounce of yellow mustard" with no figure in front of it. The fraction has been lost, and there is no way to recover it from the surrounding proportions.
- Why the catsup failsIt directs bottling when cold. Filling jars with a cooled product and sealing them gives no heat treatment at all and no seal you can trust -- worse even than the hot-fill open-kettle practice modern guidance abandoned.
- Why the canned tomatoes failPacking peeled fruit into jars and bringing them to a boil in a water bath, with no measured processing time, added acid, or headspace, is not a validated process. Tomato varieties vary in acidity and modern ones are frequently borderline, so this is the classic route to a jar that supports Clostridium botulinum.
- The buttered tin canGreasing the interior of a tin can with butter or lard does not reliably prevent fruit acid from attacking the tinplate, and "seal with a bit of solder" means solder of the period, which was leaded. Neither belongs anywhere near food.
- Alcohol, paraffin and battingA spirit-dampened cloth under a paraffin cap and a wad of cotton is a vapour-tight cover, not a hermetic seal. Paraffin sealing is no longer recommended for any preserve, including jellies.
- If you want the flavourThe spice profile here, allspice, cloves, black and Cayenne pepper against cider or white-wine vinegar, is the backbone of nineteenth-century tomato catsup. Take it as a flavour note and follow a current tested recipe for the process.
Catsup reached English kitchens as a thin, dark, keeping sauce, the name generally traced through Malay and Chinese words for a fermented fish brine, and it was made from mushrooms, walnuts and oysters long before tomatoes entered the picture. American tomato versions were in print by the 1810s and had become a household staple by the time Household Discoveries appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century, thick, heavily spiced and sharply vinegared, still nothing like the sweetened commercial sauce that displaced it. The canning instructions beside it belong to the brief period when glass jars and tin cans had reached ordinary homes but the science had not: pressure canning was not yet domestic, and open-kettle packing, lead solder and paraffin caps still appear here as sound practice.